524627 - Folder count shows more unread messages than they actually have

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Carson Gaspar]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5pre) Gecko/20091026 Shredder/3.0pre

some folders have old messages marked as unread (unread count is too large, read messages are listed in bold)

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Clean Profile, default settings except for basic account info
2. Server is IMAP and contains unread messages in sub-folders
3. Go to "Unread folders" view in the left pane
4. Do a server side search of all children of INBOX where status isn't read (or set folder properties to "check for new mail")

Actual Results:  
- some folders show too many unread messages
- folder (in this case "INBOX.lists.zfs-discuss") shows 2 unread messages
- one "real" new message and one old message are in bold in the subject/summary pane
- after a "rebuild index" on the folder, it now shows correct unread message count and only unread message is in bold
- if I don't "rebuild folder", the same bogus "unread" messages persist across restarts of thunderbird

Expected Results:  
Only mail that is actually unread is marked as such

I can reproduce this at will, but not consistently (different folders have the problem, may be fine at launch and be broken only after several checks for new mail). Anything that causes Thunderbird to visit a folder can trigger this (mail search, folder compaction, ...)

I have never seen this on my INBOX, nor on my immediate children of INBOX, but I have very few of those compared to my dozens of third level folders (INBOX.something.folder)

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

sometimes rebuild index helps. But often is not permanent because it might not affect the root cause.  The fact that you see this in a clean profile may interest someone to help fix. But this is something of a dark area, so you might not see action here for a good while until other bugs get addressed.

no major effect on functionality, so definitely not severity major. see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#importance

Comment 2

[Clint Priest]

I'm also experiencing this, it has happened about 7 times in one week.  Exiting and starting thunderbird, until now has solved it.  Thankfully the rebuild has fixed it for me this time.

I would definitely not call this a minor bug.  Personally I keep some messages in the past as unread to note that I need to address it still, having those messages lost in a sea of inaccurately unread messages is a huge problem for me.

Comment 3

[Clint Priest]

This is occurring for me on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100111 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.1

Comment 4

[Altaveron]

May be dup of the bug 551694  - Dock shows a double count of unread messages on startup

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Carson, do you still see this?

Comment 6

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to previous question. If you feel this bug was in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.